The road to the moon and beyond to Mars.

[Ozexpatriate]

2 hours ago, Flying Pig said:

Strictly, we haven't as the LEM used a separate ascent engine which wasn't exposed during landing. 

And the LM descent stage was a defacto launchpad for the ascent stage.

[Legend]

13 hours ago, ERIC ALLTORQUE said:

Check out Andromeda,its heading straight for us.

 

How long have I got?  With my luck Accurascale will just have announced class 313/314/315

[Flying Pig]

1 hour ago, Legend said:

 

How long have I got?  With my luck Accurascale will just have announced class 313/314/315

 

About 4 billion years.  But why wait?  Buy the Revolution N gauge model and let the expansion of the Universe do the rest.

[57xx]

18 hours ago, Flying Pig said:

Strictly, we haven't as the LEM used a separate ascent engine which wasn't exposed during landing. 

 

There is research on interaction of rocket plumes with the surfaces of different bodies:

 

https://sciences.ucf.edu/class/landing-team/background/

 

True the ascent module used a separate engine but we still have experience of landing on the moon using a thrust driven vehicle. The "research" supports my stance:

 

Quote

On the Moon, the plume does not generally dig a crater or deep scour hole. this is because there is no significant atmosphere on the Moon to focus the rocket exhaust onto a narrow patch. Instead, it is spread out with very gradual pressure gradients on the surface. The main effect is to sweep away the loose material. 

 

No Crater.

 

Out of the five landings only one engine bell, on the Apollo 15 mission, got damaged due to a combination of factors - a hard landing, landing on the edge of a small crater and having an engine bell 10" longer than previous landings.

 

I am playing devil's advocate somewhat, due to the claims I've seen on other sites that the lack of flame trench was to test out whether Starship could land/launch from the moon. Starship and Super Heavy are apples and oranges. A solid (or not...) concrete pad on earth is not the same as regolith in vacuum on the moon. etc etc. 

 

I am actually curious if this will work, a single stage to land and take off with all that entails, the returning astronaut's first words "This is one massive step for a (wo)man..." as they peer down the 160ft drop to the moons surface. It all looks very Buck Rogers, but then Falcon 9s landing and being re-used is routine now, who would have thought that possible 60 years ago.

[Flying Pig]

5 minutes ago, 57xx said:

 

True the ascent module used a separate engine but we still have experience of landing on the moon using a thrust driven vehicle. The "research" supports my stance:

 

 

No Crater.

 

Out of the five landings only one engine bell, on the Apollo 15 mission, got damaged due to a combination of factors - a hard landing, landing on the edge of a small crater and having an engine bell 10" longer than previous landings.

 

I am playing devil's advocate somewhat, due to the claims I've seen on other sites that the lack of flame trench was to test out whether Starship could land/launch from the moon. Starship and Super Heavy are apples and oranges. A solid (or not...) concrete pad on earth is not the same as regolith in vacuum on the moon. etc etc. 

 

I am actually curious if this will work, a single stage to land and take off with all that entails, the returning astronaut's first words "This is one massive step for a (wo)man..." as they peer down the 160ft drop to the moons surface. It all looks very Buck Rogers, but then Falcon 9s landing and being re-used is routine now, who would have thought that possible 60 years ago.

 

You have to remember that Musk's primary stated interest is Mars (regardless of whether you think he has anything aprroaching the capability to get there).  The situation there is apparently different:

 

Quote

For large, human-class missions on Mars, all the research concurs: there will be very deep, violent cratering of the regolith that can pose serious hazards to the life of the crew. This is very different than what happened during the lunar landings. It is also very different than what happened on the smaller, robotic landings on Mars. The reason it is so different? (1) Mars has larger gravity and requires larger landers for the long human-class missions, compared to the Moon. (2) Mars has an atmosphere that focuses the rocket exhaust into a jet, which creates sharp pressure gradients on the soil causing it to fail by shearing as well as by driving pressure into the subsurface, which we call Bearing Capacity Failure (BCF) and Diffusion-Driving Shearing (DDS), neither of which can happen on typical lunar soil. (3) Martian soil is much weaker and more porous than lunar soil. Lunar soil has been gardened by micrometeoroids and thermal cycled by direct sunlight for billions of years in vacuum. Martian soil has experienced geological sorting and has not endured the degree of micrometeoroid bombardment or thermal cycling because its atmosphere protects the surface. These three factors mean that human-class landings on Mars will be in a different regime of behavior than all prior experience. It will be a lot like landing a rocket on desert sand on Earth, blasting a deep and wide hole, and shooting rocks back up at the lander at high speed.

 

[57xx]

2 minutes ago, Flying Pig said:

 

You have to remember that Musk's primary stated interest is Mars (regardless of whether you think he has anything aprroaching the capability to get there).  The situation there is apparently different:

 

 

 

Yes, I've been deliberately not mentioning Mars. 🙂 But again, it's still apples and oranges, but with added bananas.

[Reorte]

Another point about using methane as a fuel - how much of an environmental issue that is depends entirely on where it came from. If it was locked away somewhere, then potentially one. If it was synthesised from CO2 and water then burning it just goes back to CO2 and water, so net zero contribution (although of course that doesn't account for the energy used to synthesise it in the first place, but the same's true of hydrogen).

[57xx]

Ref Starship landing on the moon, I've been watching the video below and at 25mins they start discussing the HLS that Space X are developing for NASA and point out the landing thrusters are actually near the top of the ship so there will be no Raptors firing at that point. For take off they speculate that it can use the landing thrusters to do an initial launch before lighting up the Raptors. Mars however is still a whole different matter.

 

 

[ERIC ALLTORQUE]

Well they have made a start,this will take a bit to sort but i am sure they will get to a solution as quick as possible to get on with flight tests. The next one has no HPU for thrust vectoring so if they get a full spread of raptors should be a better flight and ship 26 is just a stainless bullet to look at so no re entry planed.

[woodenhead]

I call it dangerous, would you want to ride a rocket whose engines fail to the point it destroys the rocket and peppers not only the launch pad but hundred of metres beyond with debris.  They are lucky it didn't destroy the fuel tanks or even the whole thing on the launch pad.

[Flying Pig]

15 minutes ago, woodenhead said:

I call it dangerous, would you want to ride a rocket whose engines fail to the point it destroys the rocket and peppers not only the launch pad but hundred of metres beyond with debris.  They are lucky it didn't destroy the fuel tanks or even the whole thing on the launch pad.

 

I watched that one too.  It does leave me with the impression that the entire project is being conducted in a thoroughly reckless fashion, particularly with regard to environmental concerns.  The destruction of SpaceX equipment and vehicles (and those of staff) is mind boggling.  I think the regulators need to tighten the reign considerably.

 

The destruction of the launchpad was not caused by failing engines however and would have occured even if the engines had all operated perfectly. It may (or not) have been the cause of some of the engine failures.

[ERIC ALLTORQUE]

10 hours ago, woodenhead said:

I call it dangerous, would you want to ride a rocket whose engines fail to the point it destroys the rocket and peppers not only the launch pad but hundred of metres beyond with debris.  They are lucky it didn't destroy the fuel tanks or even the whole thing on the launch pad.

Its far from anything that anyone will be riding for a long time yet,all the starship and booster program is development items until its clock reliable like falcon and  falcon heavy,its not a danger as the are is cleared for miles,as far as the engines on lift off the three missing were cut off by spacex,not by flying fondag,it was a big success as far as a first flight the way it was tumbling 360 and not failing doing just that.

[Ozexpatriate]

11 minutes ago, ERIC ALLTORQUE said:

as far as the engines on lift off the three missing were cut off by spacex, not by flying fondag

Has SpaceX said that somewhere?

[ERIC ALLTORQUE]

4 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

Has SpaceX said that somewhere?

Elon has said three were shut off,any outer ring raptor cannot be started off the pad as only the centre ones have restart in flight.

[ERIC ALLTORQUE]

 

[woodenhead]

29 minutes ago, ERIC ALLTORQUE said:

Elon has said three were shut off,any outer ring raptor cannot be started off the pad as only the centre ones have restart in flight.

 

52 minutes ago, ERIC ALLTORQUE said:

Its far from anything that anyone will be riding for a long time yet,all the starship and booster program is development items until its clock reliable like falcon and  falcon heavy,its not a danger as the are is cleared for miles,as far as the engines on lift off the three missing were cut off by spacex,not by flying fondag,it was a big success as far as a first flight the way it was tumbling 360 and not failing doing just that.

It was dropping engines all the way up, it destroyed it's launch pad and SpaceX have damaged the local eco-system - the rocket itself looks like it blew up rather than was blown up.

 

I don't see much success apart from 'it cleared the tower'.

 

None of this is new stuff - they've been playing with raptor engines for years yet seemed to have no idea or care what would happen when you had 33 of them fire up together.

 

Elon is under pressure to get this into space, he has NASA money and contracts so he appears to now be rushing to prove something, after this showing I hope he's grounded for the foreseeable.

[ERIC ALLTORQUE]

14 minutes ago, woodenhead said:

 

It was dropping engines all the way up, it destroyed it's launch pad and SpaceX have damaged the local eco-system - the rocket itself looks like it blew up rather than was blown up.

 

I don't see much success apart from 'it cleared the tower'.

 

None of this is new stuff - they've been playing with raptor engines for years yet seemed to have no idea or care what would happen when you had 33 of them fire up together.

 

Elon is under pressure to get this into space, he has NASA money and contracts so he appears to now be rushing to prove something, after this showing I hope he's grounded for the foreseeable.

All of this is new stuff,your confusing raptor full flow staged combustion cycle with the current merlin off falcon and falcon heavy, which are clock reliable but open cycle engines.

Hes under no pressure,Spacex is the major NASA ride to orbit for them and the US military space force.

 

[ERIC ALLTORQUE]

Tonights Falcon Heavy launch.no recovery of core or boosters. Weathers looking good tonight for it.

[ERIC ALLTORQUE]

On the Andromeda thing

 

[Ozexpatriate]

Early findings released on the failed Japanese lunar lander in April:

 

CNN: Japan’s Ispace reveals why its lunar lander crashed into the moon

 

The usual saga of multiple failures - sudden elevation change passing over a cliff, a 5km error in altitude calculation, ran out of fuel, resulting in free fall and impact.

[ERIC ALLTORQUE]

 

[ERIC ALLTORQUE]

On 26/05/2023 at 19:51, Ozexpatriate said:

Early findings released on the failed Japanese lunar lander in April:

 

CNN: Japan’s Ispace reveals why its lunar lander crashed into the moon

 

The usual saga of multiple failures - sudden elevation change passing over a cliff, a 5km error in altitude calculation, ran out of fuel, resulting in free fall and impact.

 

[ERIC ALLTORQUE]

Ship 25,the next to fly on booster 9 was static fire tested yesterday.

[ERIC ALLTORQUE]

 

[ERIC ALLTORQUE]